There is a line in David Peace’s Nineteen Eighty Three (2002) that is so resonant that its absence is all but unimaginable: ‘To us all and to the North – where we do what we want!’ (Peace 228). In a series of short articles for Alluvium I use the malevolence and pathos of this line – a toast drunk by corrupt police officers to a chimerical space which, as Christopher …
View More Original Modern or a New Kind of Ordinary?Author: Alexander Beaumont
Dr Alexander Beaumont is Lecturer in English Literature at York St. John University with research interests in post-war British culture, Thatcherism and the British Left, and contemporary representations of the city. His essay “‘New Times Television? Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette” appears in Thatcher and After. He recently published a monograph entitled Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and has essays in Contemporary Literature (55.2) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015). He is currently working on post-devolution representations of northern England and everyday life.